By Mercy Mutandwa | Operations Manager
We’ve just come to the end of a wonderful 1st term at the Girl Child Mentorship Programme. This is a particularly important term for us as both mentors and mentees are navigating new relationships and making new connections. We started the term with a wonderful part-planning and part-social breakfast meeting with all our mentors in January. It was a great time of talking about the heart of volunteering with Mrs A and sharing a lovely breakfast.
Come February, our 3 teams were all ready to go out to our 3 schools in the high density areas and launch the programme for 2024. In total, we have 30 mentees aged 13-15, 10 at each school. We want to thank our partner schools for choosing mentees for us year in and year out. It’s no easy feat to select just 10 girls out of the many who may need the programme. Already, it’s been a great pleasure working with these 30 mentees. Some of them started out very shy and a bit unsure but all of them are loving being part of the programme and we have enjoyed seeing them grow in the 8 sessions that we were fortunate to hold. Most of them learnt to crochet for the first time and speaking in front of other people is a skill that most mentees are still getting used to.
The 8th session was our much loved end of term lunch. The team made a delicious meal of rice, chicken and coleslaw and there was plenty to go around! Dessert was ice-cream and home-made chocolate cake (thank you Joan!). We had an inspiring talk from Mrs A and Miss Mercy taught about maintaining good personal hygiene with inconsistent water supply and very little resources. We were so fortunate to have been able to give each mentee 3 sanitary pants, a face towel, a toothbrush and toothpaste. Art therapy saw us end the day. This time only 2 mentees had painted before, it was completely new for the rest and they really enjoyed creating some pictures with a nature theme! These end of term lunches are so important to us. They are our opportunity as a team to try and pamper the mentees and show them how special they are. Our mentees are often facing challenging day to day situations. Their normal day often starts very early, involving chores such as walking to fetch water, warming water for bathing using open fire or gas stoves, cleaning the house, doing laundry etc and all before school. Sadly three meals a day are not the standard amongst many families, many families have one or two meals a day and a lot of them are meatless. The lunch programme is a real treat for them and a time to completely relax.
At the end of term 1 we sadly said goodbye to Sharon and Percy, two of our longest serving mentors. Both are past Makomborero students who have recently graduated from the University of Zimbabwe. They are now embarking on their chosen careers and can no longer commit to the Girl Child Mentorship Programme. We want to say a heart-felt thank you to both these incredible ladies for all the Saturdays they sacrificed for the last 6 years and every life they have touched. The team will miss these two ‘big sisters’ and we wish them well for now and the future.
We are in the thick of school holidays and we are busy getting ready for Term 2. We are looking forward to a fun ‘crocheting refresher’ with the mentors and many more sessions as Term 2 is the longer term of the 3. Term 1 has been all about making new connections as well as planting and building friendship. Thank you to all who made this possible!
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